


Towards Grace

by woodenpicador



Category: Perry Mason (TV 2020)
Genre: Chapter 8, Gen, Missing Scene, finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28132479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodenpicador/pseuds/woodenpicador
Summary: Alice runs. Set during Chapter 8.
Relationships: Perry Mason & Sister Alice
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Towards Grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moon_custafer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_custafer/gifts).



**Revelations**

Alice runs. Her mother’s voice cries out behind her, but she doesn’t look back. She is flanked by palm trees that loom like sentinels of a vengeful God. She knows that the second she stops running, she will be overtaken. Her mother’s voice fades, but rings ethereally.

She knows it in her head that the child her mother clutches isn’t Charlie Dodson. Worse, she knows it in her heart. She doesn’t stop to see if God will tell her what to do, where to go. She knows she’ll hear nothing, and fears what she’ll hear if she’s wrong.

She keeps running. Each step burns an ache into the arches of her feet. Each step dirties her white vestment with the miasma of the sinful city. She runs until the city dissolves, until the buildings rise lower and lower like a decimated forest. The sentinels have ended their watch, and Alice finally, finally stops. She no longer recognizes what surrounds her, nor the glimpse of a crazed, frightened girl she catches in the glass window of a darkened storefront.

She hears a giggling shriek and realizes it’s her own throat erupting without her knowledge. She’s felt the spirit before, spoken in tongues unknown to mortal man, but this is different. This is of her, not God, this is something fallen and mundane and craven. She bites the inside of her cheek to stop the noise, and she doesn’t unclench her jaw until she tastes blood.

A woman stares at her, owlish eyes magnified by spectacles. Nerves draw her thin-lipped mouth into a tight, barely visible line above a pointed chin.

Blood still cakes Alice’s face, and now some dribbles from the corner of her mouth as she forces her lips into a stiff, broken smile. Tears run hot down her cheeks.

“Have you heard the good news?” Alice says. Her mouth burbles. She is shrieking and laughing and crying, and the woman darts away, and finally Alice is quiet.

She looks down. There is blood on her vestment. It is red as a stop sign.

**Proverbs**

She sleeps for a week, even when she’s not sleeping. Alice slumbers but she moves through the world. She’s not sure how she cleans herself up, how she makes her way out from under the gaze of the city’s angels. Carmel is far enough away that she feels quiet, if not quietude. Her soul roils with flashes of memory, screams and popping flashbulbs, and her mother’s echoing voice.

The room she lets is little more than a cell, and when she stands beside her narrow bed her shoulder brushes the wall. It feels right to her, though. Once she has the room, she sleeps—really sleeps—for another three days. She wakes famished, golden hair now a frayed mane.

There is a nightstand with a drawer that has been jammed so hard back that no matter how Alice tries, she cannot pull it open. There is also a chair and if she positions it and herself just right, she can make a desk at which she can read and write.

She sits at it, and realizes she has no one to write and nothing to read. She is an empty vessel. Maybe she always has been, relying on God to fill her with desire—no, purpose. Maybe it hasn’t been God at all, but the elders and her mother before them, and between that a procession of sinners from whom something was needed.

Alice is not so craven, so devoid of self-insight, that she thinks of herself as a puppet for older, wiser men and women with their own schemes and plots. No, she knows the truth. Whatever they wanted from her, they provided something in return. Admiration. Adulation. She was a vessel not just for them, but for the love and worship of her flock, and she knew it. That thought seizes Alice’s chest like a grip from beyond, an icy fist squeezing her heart.

She looks in the mirror and her flaxen halo only bellows the truth she hates. She is no Moses. She is a golden calf.

The next morning, she rises when the sun. She waits outside the town’s druggist until the reedy man opens the shop. His keys jangle like chains. Alice taps her foot impatiently. The turning of the earth cares not at all for her self-discovery, for her transformation. She is almost abashed, humbled by the slow procession of the man as he meticulously prepares his store for the day to come. When he finally turns the sign in the door to read Open, Alice marches in. She buys a sharp knife and an inky concoction.

She spends long enough in the communal washroom that someone bangs angrily on the door. She emerges crowned with dark hair, and with sharp eyes she dares the groggy man to say something to her. He declines her invitation.

**Ecclesiastes**

She finds the job not long after, the owner a portly man named Roland who asks if she’s ever worked an honest job. She bites at the inside of her cheek and answers no, because she knows what he means and also because it is the truth. Her teeth worry the still-raw patch of flesh.

“Are you in trouble?” he asks.

She freezes, and flashbulbs pop in her ears. She swears a crowd is baying just outside the diner.

“With the law, I mean,” he says, as if he can read the depths of her eyes.

“No.”

Roland is a petty tyrant the way all bosses are, but he’s honest and if he’s angry he makes it known. He doesn’t hide between false faces and obscured intentions. He doesn’t scheme, cheat, or lie. At first, she tries to discern his moods. She looks for signs, reasons, causes—a plan. But there is no plan, not that she can tell. A dropped coffee cup might shatter his calm like splintered porcelain, or he might sour if the midday rush more trickles than rushes. Sometimes there’s no sense to it at all. The absence of signs becomes a sign.

She takes walks after each shift, longer and longer each time. She explores, and lets uncertainty bloom like a garden as she takes the winding path along the shore.’

Around the time she stops counting each day she’s spent in Carmel, she walks until she finds the mission. It stands with plain-faced resolve on the bluff. She walks no farther that day, or the next day, or the day after that.

It takes her a week to work up the courage to kneel and clasp her hands. Her mouth goes dry. She realizes that she has not done this, humbled herself and prayed, since she left Los Angeles. She can’t bring herself to close her eyes.

She hears nothing, and its such a yawning nothing that she questions whether she ever heard anything else.

Alice returns to town, returns to her room with its narrow bed and its stuck nightstand drawer. She doesn’t venture back to the mission for days.

But she does venture back. She kneels again. This time, she is ready for the silence.

**Acts**

Mason finds her on a Thursday morning, heralded by a windy morning with more bite than usual. He finds her at work, and she can’t help but give a slight smile. He found her. That’s what he does. He finds things. It is his nature, God-given and true.

She figured him for a Catholic when they first met, and though that all seems so far away now she can’t say she figures him any different now. He wears his shattered faith on the outside, like he was thrown through a stained-glass window and hasn’t yet shaken off the fragments.

Alice thinks that’s on purpose, and that’s why she smiles. A man doesn’t wear glittering shards of colored glass on his clothes unless he wants someone to notice the light refracting off of them. Maybe someone particular. She thinks, for a moment, that she might be that someone.

He stares her down with sunken eyes, and the moment passes. When she takes her break, she walks him to the rocky shore and listens to the waves crash. She wants to share this with them, and see what he might share in return.

He disappoints her, but she doesn’t feel lesser for it. She tries to explain to him what she’s come to know, that chasing certainty is a path to misery or delusion or most likely both. She can’t quite say what she’s come to know: she was never a woman of faith at all. She never had the doubt necessary, the proving ground. She always knew, she was always certain.

Mason asks his final question and she gives him one in return, an exchange of last gifts. She leaves him by the water and walks to the mission. Roland will be angry with her, her break has already gone long past its allotted time. When the time comes, she’ll render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

She walks to the mission. She prays. She wonders if Mason will follow her, but he doesn’t.

When she’s had her fill of silence, she returns to town. Doris waves her off when she walks by the diner, and the message is clear. Best to steer clear, to let the boss’s rage burn bright and then snuff itself out. She gives a grateful nod.

As the sun sets, she sits at the makeshift desk in her little room. She idly tugs at the stuck drawer, and this time, it opens. Inside is a small, battered book. It looks like it’s been through a lot. The pages are stained and some are wrinkled where they’ve been folded with neither rhyme nor reason.

She knows the verse like she knows her own name, but how well is that, really? That, and reading something that isn’t an order slip is like Greek to her now. Her eyes scan the words over and over until she finally gives in and reads aloud.

Alice begins.


End file.
